Research

The study of the relative contribution of genes and environment to the risk of common diseases presents a number of statistical challenges, from study design to analysis. My research focus is statistical methodology in genetic epidemiology, including family-based and population-based case-control studies.

My current projects include methods to measure association between haplotypes of multiple tightly-linked markers and disease in matched case-control studies and to detect gene x gene and gene x environment interactions. I am also interested in using joint variation in DNA sequence and gene expression to better understand disease etiology.

I collaborate with colleagues in the Department of Epidemiology and the Channing Laboratory on a number of large-scale cohort studies, such as the Nurses’ Health Study, as well as the international Cohort Consortium for Breast and Prostate Cancer.